Day 18: "moist"

In a continuation of this week's theme, more stir fry!  This time, with a salmon to top it off!

Notes

• It seems that this week is turning into an extended lesson in moisture, sources of it and the effects on heat transfer.  In today's stir fry, I threw in tomatoes right after sauteing the mushrooms.  This introduced a lot of moisture all at once, which mean that the mix, including the eggs, became sort of goopy, sweaty, and messy
• However, the moisture served to transfer heat much more regularly than with just the wok, and the overall mixture came out tasting more homogeneously flavored
• Drizzling the wet-ish mixture over the lettuce straight out of the pan and letting it sit for 5 minutes also ended up cooking the leaves a little, in a very pleasant way, that removed some of the inherent bitterness
• I still need to work on the salmon.  Despite the fact that I cooked it relatively quickly over lower heat, it was still slightly overcooked and the fats came oozing out
• I figured out what that white stuff was - it was the grease between the chunks of flesh and the way to avoid it is just to avoid overcooking the fish, it's that simple

Cheers,

Hanchen

Day 17: resuming normal service

I'm back from my week of travels, and now, back to our plan!  We'll back fill the 3 meals I did prepare last week sometime later, but let's start with today's.

Something I want to start doing is themes.  That would allow me to focus in on one or two things and intensively work on them over a short period of time, which should hopefully improve the skill improvement curve.  The other thing is that I've decided to leave the exciting, interesting stuff to the weekends.  On the weekdays, I get back too late to experiment around too much, and I am perfectly comfortable living off stir fry variations on the weekday, and so that's where I think I'm settling.

Oh and I've also settled on sweet potatoes as my regular carb source, which should make things easier.

Notes:

• The spinach carried the flavor of the dish a lot better than the bak choy.  However, I am torn between two theories as to why.  One theory is that this is due to some specific aspect of the geometry of the vegetables, while the other theory is simply that the simplicity of the sweetness of the spinach did the work.
• Without the browning and surface caramelization, the chicken was not even close to as good as the last time I did this.  This time, the problem was that the marinade was too wet.  This would probably be alleviated with corn starch, or simply being more careful about how the chicken was thrown into the wok.
• The mushrooms didn't do a lot in concert with the dish.  I am curious why this is so - in the soup that I made, they came out very nicely, with strong, distinct flavors coming to the top. 

Cheers,

Hanchen

Day 9: something old, and something new

To start the afternoon off, another omelet!  This tasted a lot better than it looked, truth be told.  A few things - the heat should have been much lower when I threw the eggs in at first, the peppers were a really good addition, the tomatoes were surprisingly delightful, and the bacon crumbs added a really nice texture.  Not adding the stem on the thyme was also a winning move - moving forward!

Dinner was stir fried vegetables, steamed chicken leg, and as a new addition, mushroom soup.  Lesson with the chicken leg, time spent steaming is not additive - you can't steam something for 10 minutes, take it off, and put it on for 5 minutes again, and expect it to be equivalent to 15 minutes of steaming.  This should have been obvious, the thing about cooking is heat transfer, and so taking the chicken out and letting it cool was basically a reset.

The mushroom soup was interesting, and pretty pleasant.  The trick, it seems is to saute the mushrooms and let it sweat for a bit, to get the flavors out before pouring in the chicken stock.  Also, it helped to have a good mixture of mushrooms in there.  I'll invest in a blender and do it properly next time to get a nice thick creamy soup.

Good sturdy, hearty stuff all round.


Cheers,
Hanchen

Day 8: winner, winner, chicken dinner

Breaking with the templates of the last week, the next couple of posts will be simpler and shorter, in particular because next week will be a significant travel week.

First, here's what I made on Friday: steamed fish, chicken scraps soup, and potato pancake things.  The potato pancake thing was my downfall.  In retrospect, it was slightly too ambitious for how late it was when I started with prep.  It required dicing ingredients, which I am not good at and get frustrated by, and the patty-like nature was closer to baking than cooking, which I am also hilariously bad at.  The thing was pretty tasty, but it took a stupid amount of time to prepare and wasn't quite worth the effort in the end.

To re-calibrate myself, I prepared something much simpler, going back to basics with a simple chicken stir fry.  For this - what I did was that I blanched the vegetables before throwing them into the wok for the stir fry, and it seemed to have done some good.  I also tossed the chicken chunks around in a very hot wok to add a nice char all round to kick it all off.  Pretty simple stuff, but  well enough, and so no complaints here.

Cheers,

Hanchen

Day 7: pride cometh before the fall

I guess what they say is true - the worst thing you can do is let hubris get to you.  It's 1:30am and I only just finished cleaning up.  That was a 2.5 hour long lesson in why you should not get over your skis.  I'll punt on the meal discussion today and come back to it tomorrow.


Cheers,
Hanchen

Day 6: a tiny step forward

I'd rate tonight's dinner as the most satisfying since we started on this adventure.  A couple of things went right, coming together in a confluence of positive outcomes.  

• Prep was easy and straightforward, and with fewer moving parts as well as no novelty in the process, there was less requirement for error allowance.  As a result, the execution felt much less like a chore and much more like warming up before exercise.  
• The flavour profiles of today's dishes were simple and interesting, but most importantly did not allow room for me to fall back on my standard crutch of "make it spicy".  The simplicity of it also allowed me to work on a couple of the points I had noted for day 4 and day 5, which was very gratifying.
• Simple set up = simple clean up.  I wrapped the whole affair in and hour and a half, which is much better than I have achieved previously.

Menu:

• Dinner: potato wedges, drunken chicken
• Time spent: ~45min prep, ~15 mins clean up
• Estimated cost of inventory used: $6.31

Key lessons of the day:

• The whole "organic" movement is quite uneconomical and I am starting to develop a bias against it - mark ups are any where from 40-300% (!!), and I'm not sure that the marginal benefits are worth the cost.  
• Wholefoods tends to lay out the organic stuff as the default option, compelling you to search for the non-organic options - here, on the other hand, the dollar savings are well worth the fractional increases in search cost 
• A cold water bath really did help improve the texture of the chicken, especially the skin.  
• The advice someone in a video on youtube (maybe Gordon Ramsey?) gave to use wine good enough to drink on its own when cooking rather than pouring in your cheapest shit unsurprisingly also extends to other alcohols, in my case here, whiskey.

Open questions

• Why did the chicken skin shrink and shrivel up?
• My hypothesis here is that it was the fat underneath it propping it in place, which begs the question, how do we prevent it from shriveling up and staying nice and firm on the chicken?

Meal breakdowns

Dinner: potato wedges, steamed chicken

The results: the chicken was a touch tougher than it had to be, and so the lesson here is probably that it didn't need to sit in the steamer for that long after the initial cooking phase.  Otherwise, flavours were good all round.  I recognized that the plating for the wedges were a little silly, but I was hungry and in a rush to get to it. 

General prep scheme - chicken:

• Cut the chicken thigh up
• In retrospect, unnecessary
• Added half an ounce (half a shot glass) of whiskey, quarter ounce of sesame oil, sea salt, pepper, ginger shreds, garlic slices, and tossed the whole thing around in a bowl
• Put into a cold steamer and steamed for 10 mins after the water started to boil, then turned off the power and kept it there for another 5 minutes
• Will try 8 mins and 3 minutes next time
• Took the chicken out and placed into a ziploc bag, then submerged in an ice bath
• After the chicken was placed on the plate, poured the juices from the bowl in the steamer over the chicken, which worked to bring it back up in temperature a little
• For the sauce on top, fried the white part of a spring onion and some garlic in avocado oil for about 5 mins, and poured the oil at the end over the green bits of spring onion and finely diced garlic and ginger 

Other notes:

• Whiskey flavour came out very well - this was the right amount, I think.  Next time, worth leaving chicken in the mixture to marinate for half an hour.

General prep scheme - potato wedges:

• Olive oil, rosemary, salt, pepper, light touch of paprika on wedges
• Oven at 210 degrees Celsius - baked for 25 minutes, sat in over for 5 more minutes.  

Other notes:

• Could have used a touch more crisp, maybe oven at 210 for 20 minutes and then at 240 for 5 more, no sitting time?

This felt pretty good, kind of like when you level up.  Onwards!

Cheers,

Hanchen

Day 5: waste not, want not

I have a thing where I am very uncomfortable about wasting food.  While that is good for economy of food prep, sometimes that result in dishes I prepare that are pretty ugly.  In my opinion working with leftover and scraps can make for some pretty compelling options, but I think I'll need to work on it a little more before I try to make my case in earnest.

Menu:

• Dinner: sauteed shrimp on bak choy, toasted sweet potato chips, chicken carcass soup
• Time spent: ~1.5 hour prep, 15 mins clean up
• Estimated cost of inventory used: $5.28

Key lessons of the day:

• I tend to cheat with spicy flavours: when in doubt, I tend to add peppers and chillis.  This results in flavour profiles that fit my preferences and tastes really well, but is still a cheat, and I need to diversify out a little more.
• That chicken carcass soup was surprisingly filling.  Two bowls of it, with scraps of chicken, celery, carrots, and onions made for a whole meal - the shrimp and chips actually kind of put me over the top.
• The chicken stock I made was 1) too watery and 2) too vegetable-y.  Needs more work and iteration for next week
• You know what would have made the soup better?  An egg.  Always remember the egg.

Open questions

• Why did my sweet potato chips cook differently on each side?  
• One side looked pale and dried out, while the other side developed a nice crisp while staying nice and golden.
• My hypothesis is that side that was initially put into the oven, which turned pale, lost its moisture while it was cooking, leaving a dry layer that crisped.
• If my hypothesis is correct, the solution to the problem is to cover the chips with another layer of foil, to cook both sides, before adding a char to it.

Meal breakdown

The result: the shrimp worked well, but could have been tended to better because some of the smaller bits ended up marginally tougher, and may have been over done.  I think the woodear worked here for this dish, because of the texture it adds, but it's probably not necessary.  The bak choy also ended slightly more rubbery than I would have wanted - I think it calls for even less time on the stove.

I'm going to skip on the prep description and notes, because it's late and I am very exhausted.  Suffice it to say, nothing really notable here, just rehashing stuff I've done before in the last few days.

Cheers,

Hanchen

Day 4: coming from good stock

I guess the highlight of the day today was less the dinner, which was relatively boring, and more the preparation of the chicken for the rest of this week.  This was something that I probably should have done yesterday, when I had significantly more time, but I clearly did not plan ahead of myself well enough.  

An important aspect improving the economics of prep is to use as much of what I buy as I possibly can.  As such, I am buying my chicken whole, and then using as much of the whole bird as I can.  I divide the bird into a pair of thigh and drumsticks, and two slabs of breast meat, making for four discrete serving portions.  This leaves the carcass which is used to prepare stock - I'll do a separate post on the stock tomorrow, after it's settled and chilled in the fridge.

Menu:

• Dinner: Stir fried chicken and bak choy (take 2), steamed sweet potatoes, mixed green salads from wholefoods.
• Time spent: ~0.5 hour prep, 15 mins clean up
• Estimated cost of inventory used: $13.41
• The wholefoods salad bar is pretty damn pricey

Key lessons of the day:

• Working with chicken can be pretty messy and annoying - I need to figure out a way to better set up my prep area.
• Probably should have used scissors to process the chicken shreds; the knife is not the solution to every problem.

Meal breakdowns

Dinner: stir fried chicken and bak choy (take 2), steamed sweet potatoes, mixed green salads from wholefoods

The results: much better than the first go!  In my opinion, this looked a little better put together, and the fact that it did not taste like an entirely prawn based dish was definitely helpful. 

General prep scheme - stir fried vegetables with chicken

• Fried up a slice of bacon, cut up to divide the lean from the fat
• Kept the bacon oil and fatty bits of bacon in the pan, threw in onions, garlic, and jalapeno peppers
• Threw the chicken in, entirely uncooked this time, and stir fried until color change was obvious
• Tossed in celery, then bak choy stems, then bak choy leaves, then wood ears last
• Tossed around a bit until bak choy started changing color
• Poured in 2oz of water, cooked until water was mostly dried up
• I determined this point by listening for a change from a bubbling sound to a sizzling sound.

Other notes:

• On the one hand, I think it was way too complicated as a dish.  There were too many flavours involved and it lacked distinctive character.  
• On the other hand, it was a very simple dish, it packed basically everything I wanted to have for dinner into a single that tied together pretty well, was simple to prepare, and importantly, was simple to clean up.

Holy shit the chicken stock took a lot of time to prepare and it is late.

Cheers,

Hanchen

Day 3: half day off

So today was a bit of a cheat day, since I had lunch outside, and a pretty heavy one at that, so that was one less meal, and a very light dinner to prep.  

Menu:

• Dinner: Egg custard, carrot chips, and steamed vegetables.
• Time spent: ~0.5 hour prep, 15 mins clean up
• Estimated cost of inventory used: $5.16

Key lessons of the day:

• Air bubbles that was beat into the egg resulted in an outstandingly ugly egg custard.

Meal breakdowns

Dinner: Egg custard, carrot chips, and steamed vegetables

The results: as discussed above, this was one ugly bowl of egg custard.  Separately, the carrot and tomato could definitely have been eaten whole, rather than being cut, but I thought it would be a good chance to get some practice in knife work.  Unsurprising, there's still a ways to go.

General prep scheme:

• Cut up some mushrooms, wood ear, a couple of slices of carrots, and threw into a bowl, topped with some bonito flakes
• Beat up two eggs and added in a teaspoon of the prawn shell stock.
• Poured the mixture over the bowl with ingredients in it
• Steamed for 15 minutes
• Seasoned with sesame oil, salt and pepper

Other notes:

• The egg custard was pretty good, so the flavouring worked out, but clearly the presentation and preparation needed some work.  I think the trick next time is either beat very slowly or let the egg rest to let the air beat into it settle.

Today was a day off; tomorrow, we'll get back at it again, this time, on a weekday, where the challenge will be to do food prep after a full day of work.

Cheers,

Hanchen

Day 2 (retrospective post): fastly fastly

I wasn't particularly timed constrained, but I was lazy, and so for today's meal prep, I focused on being more time efficient than I was on day 1.

Menu:

• Brunch: Bacon and eggs over medium
• Time spent: ~0.5 hour prep, 15 mins clean up
• Estimated cost of inventory used: $7.47
• Dinner: Stemmed whole pomfret, stir fried vegetables with chicken, sweet potatoes with bacon bits
• Time spent: ~1 hour prep, 15 mins clean up
• Estimated cost of inventory used: $13.93
• The estimate is slightly inflated by the fact that I had a lot of fruits to go with the meal, which ended up being almost a quarter of the cost

Key lessons of the day:

• The bacon on the sweet potatoes was a game changer.  They were incredibly tasty.
• Stock made with prawn shells may look thin and clear, but they are in fact very intensely strong, to the extend that they can completely overpower everything else.

Open questions:

• What is the right amount of water for a stir fry?
• Two of two times that I have made stir fry, it has finished off too wet.

Meal breakdowns

Brunch: Bacon and eggs over medium

The results: I mean, how complicated can it be, it's just bacon and eggs.  This ended exactly the way I expected - well.  Now the real question is, what could I do to make this more interesting?

General prep scheme (included for the sake of consistency):

• Made bacon
• Using bacon oil, made eggs

Other notes:

• Worth trying eggs over easy next time - my bias towards over medium or over hard with eggs seem hardly warranted.

Dinner: Stemmed whole pomfret, stir fried vegetables with chicken, sweet potatoes with bacon bits

The results: this was a very fishy meal.  The prawn stock completely over powered all other flavours in the stir-fry.  That wasn't really a problem, I enjoyed the flavour.  However, this really wasn't what I had intended with the dish.

General prep scheme - stemmed pomfret

• Gutted, cleaned, and then scored the fish on both sides
• Bought the fish from Chinatown market so it required cleaning
• Rubbed brandy into the guts and belly and up and thorough over sides of the fish
• Inserted garlic pieces, ginger slices, and lemon peel into gut, and inserted sliced garlic and a sliver of ginger into the fish where it was scored
• Drizzled sesame oil over both sides.
• Steamed for 15 minutes

Other notes:

• The fish ended up tougher than expected and so I guess the moral of the story here is that it could probably be steamed for less time.

General prep scheme - stir fried vegetables with chicken

• Heated up a pan to temperature and drizzled in some olive oil
• Seared the chicken on both sides and cut up into thin-ish slices
• Fried a slice of bacon
• Poured the bacon oil through a sieve into a pan heated up to temperature
• Threw the chicken in and stir fry until white on all sides
• Tossed in peppers, carrots, bak choy, and then wood ears last
• Tossed around a bit until bak choy started changing color
• Poured in 4oz of prawn stock

Other notes:

• That prawn sauce looked like clear and had the consistency water but it packed a mighty mighty punch; next time, it would be wise to use sparingly instead

The point of day 2 was to try to keep things simpler - in that respect, it was pretty successful.  Unfortunately, this meant that clean up took a disproportionate amount of total time spent and as a result, the ratio between total time spent prepping and cleaning and actually eating remained pretty piss poor.  But I guess, such is life.

Cheers,

Hanchen

Day 1 (retrospective post): slightly questionable beginnings

Menu:

• Brunch: Omelet (with a bunch of stuff in it)
• Time spent: ~1 hour prep, 15 mins clean up
• Most of the prep time was spent dicing things for the omelet
• Estimated cost of inventory used: $10.50
• Dinner: Baked salmon, stir fried vegetables-that-tend-to-be-sweeter, sweet potato
• Time spent: ~1.5 hour prep, 30 mins clean up
• Estimated cost of inventory used: $15.77
• That salmon was expensive, at $12.20 per pound

Key lessons of the day:

• If you put more stuff into your omelet, you need more egg.  This may seem obvious, but it is surprisingly easy to forget.
• A little touch of aromatics can go a very long way, but the only way to make it work is to lay off a bit on the stuff that's easy to indulge in, like chilis, or pepper.

Open questions:

• How do you deal with the layer of fat on a salmon?
• When salmon is cooked with the skin on, the layer of fat between the skin and the meat expands as it cooks and oozes out in a way that is visually unattractive.  Additionally, that fatty stuff has a bitter taste that I would not immediately describe as tasty.
• Is there such a thing salmon that is too well-done?
• The texture of the salmon was relatively flak-y, but parts of the salmon were tougher than I would expected.  Is this specific to the type of salmon I used, or is it a matter of technique?
• Short of using a food processor, is there a way to make dicing less of a bitch?
• Because dicing was a bitch, and I expect it will be a bitch in future preps too

Meal breakdowns

Brunch - Omelet with onions, tomatoes, bacon bits, and mushrooms / a bunch of berries

The result: the omelet is pretty fucking ugly, and it tasted pretty much like it looked.  The problem, I theorize, was that I used 3 eggs for what was really a 5 egg omelet's worth of stuff.  As a result, when the egg as added to the pan, it was very hard to work with, and as evidenced by the picture, very easy to burn.  The berries were good though.

General prep scheme:

• Cooked the bacon in a cast iron skillet with the layer of evaporating water method, 
• Transfer the bacon oil to a non-stick pan already brought up to temperature and then throwing in, in order, onions, mushrooms, tomatoes and bacon bits
• Turn the heat down to about 4 on the electric stove setting and add in the whisked egg
• As the egg settles, add salt and pepper, and some cut up fresh thyme
• At some point, fold the omelet, and cook through

Other notes:

• The way the thyme was added was a mistake - it would have been much better to pluck off the leaves of it rather than throw it in with the stems, since the stems turned out to be very irritating when eating the omelet.  
• Added an amazing fragrance to the dish though, so it worked from a flavor perspective

Dinner - Baked salmon, stir fried vegetables, sweet potato

The result: it may not look it, but the stir fried vegetables were my favorite part of the meal.  There's something about the mixture of sweet and spicy that just really hits the spot for me.  Other than what was said at the top, the salmon was really quite meh without sauce, not really worth commenting on.

General prep scheme - salmon:

• Pre-heat oven to 170 degrees Celcius
• Brought a pan up to temperature, drizzled in a light touch of avocado oil
• Put the salmon in skin size down and pressed the flesh into the pan to get more even temperature transfer on the skin
• Removed from pan, put into oven skin side up for 20 minutes
• Squeezed lemon juice onto salmon skin, garnished with skin of lemon from that wedge I juice

General prep scheme - vegetables:

• Brought a pan up to temperature, drizzled in olive oil
• Threw onions and garlic into the pan, let them sizzle in there for a bit until fragrant
• Threw in the peppers next, and for the shits of it added some red chili flakes too, and sizzled that for a bit
• Threw in the vegetables in approximately 1 minute intervals in this order: red peppers, carrots, celery, mushrooms, bak choy stems, bak choy leaves
• Salt, pepper, some paprika
• Tossed it around the pan for a bit till the bak choy leaves started to turn colour
• Added ~6oz of water, covered the pan with a lid, cooked for ~8 mins

General prep scheme - sweet potato:

• Threw into the steamer for 2 hours.  Nothing much else to it.

Other notes:

• The vegetables turned out a relatively unattractive color, suggesting they might be overcooked.  Next time, worth trying with a shorter cooking period with lid on.
• 1.1 pounds of sweet potato took much longer to steam than I would have expected.  I checked in at the 40 minute mark, and it was way far from done.  Even at the hour and a half mark, it wasn't quite there it i.e. I could not spear a chopstick through the centre easily.  2 hours seemed to have done the trick.

That worked out better than expected!  Let's see how day 2 goes.

Cheers,

Hanchen

Day 0 (retrospective post): bean counting

I blame the three day lag on this post on nua aura - online gaming with good buddies is a very, very compelling activity to do.

Anyway, enough nonsense, straight to the works - 

Day 0: Fixed Assets

The advice you usually get on blogs and books about learning to cook is to invest in a few choice pieces of good, if a little pricey equipment.  I call bullshit - at a beginner level of proficiency, there is almost certainly no way that I would be able to tell the difference between chopping vegetables with a $200 knife on a $50 wooden board versus using a cheap but functional $50 chef's knife on a $10 plastic board.  By the time I build up an intermediate skillset (~half a year?), reasonably cheap shit would still suffice and would help me identify specifically the limits of skill as opposed to limits of equipment (assuming I wasn't so cheap I bought something that had to be retired by then).  When I finally have to retire my first set of cheap shit (~3 years?), if I've been consistent, that is where it may make more sense to invest in the middle of the range.

So with that said, when I went shopping, price efficiency was definitely a top consideration.  But before I go down the shopping list, one thing has to be said:

Thank you Mo and Merry - you guys rock.

As you'll see in the tracking sheet, twice as much of my fixed asset inventory was inherited off the goodwill from the two of you sending me shit and passing down stuff to me.  For the purposes of understanding the economics of my processes, I had to assign arbitrary values to the items you guys gave me, but the gratitude I have for your thoughtfulness cannot be priced.

In total, with the $200 (post sales-tax) I spent and inherited item, my kitchen is stocked with the following items:

• Steak Knives
• Kitchen Shears
• Knife Sharpener
• Food Tongs
• Cast Iron Skillet
• 7.5" Strainer
• Ramekin 6oz
• Ramekin 10oz
• Ramekin 6oz - Flat
• Ziploc Container
• Small Containers
• Gallon Storage Container
• Roasting Pan
• Dish cloth
• Utensils
• Pots & Pan Set
• Chopping Board
• Salad Bowl - 2 piece
• Chef's Knife
• Steamer
• Plates
• Spatula Set
• Glassware

The first important question we must address is how we value the cooking surface in my apartment.  One way to think about would be to find a comparable set of equipment and use the cost of that as reference.  However, that is also not entirely realistic, since the apartment has been here for a while and it's more like a second hand stove, if nothing else.   The other way to think about it would be to charge the use of the stove as a periodic operating lease.  This is closer to reality, since the cost of the stove is very likely one at least an implicit components in the underlying pricing model for this apartment.

The first way seemed easier to me to work with rather than trying to source a reliable estimate for the leasing cost of stove equipment and so for the sake of laziness, we'll run with that approach.  If we think about it that way, then we can also assume that we would depreciate a new stove on a straight line basis over ~10 years.  So since it's been ~5 years since the last major renovation of the apartment (according to management, I didn't bother to confirm the veracity of that statement), I ran with it and assumed that I had inherited the equipment at a carrying value of half what could be found on a quick Google search.

Immediately, we see one of the key lessons of microeconomics in action here: high fixed costs result in meaningful economies of scale.

One thing to note here is that at 2100 meals (~35 meals per month for 5 years), the per meal cost of the stove equipment is ~$0.40, while at 1200 meals (~20 meals per month for 5 years) it's more than 50% higher, at ~$0.65.  That suggests I would value the use of the stove at $14/month and $13/month, respectively, or significantly less than 1% of my rent.  What this suggests to me is that landlords should invest in better stove tops in rental apartments, for fuck's sake, at least in the Chicago River North.  The economics here suggests that it is very unlikely to affect returns for property management companies, while on the other hand, I hypothesize that for people who do cook regularly, a high quality stove top/well designed kitchen area may be valued at much higher than $15 a month.

Next, onto the food!


Cheers,
Hanchen